Rose City Free Fall

by DL Barbur

  I took the fact that it was just Lubbock as a sign that nobody above him wanted to be associated with this firing. Interesting.

  Lubbock broke the silence first. “I know this is uncomfortable for all of us, so I’ll cut right to it. In return for your release of all claims against the city, and an agreement that you will surrender your state certifications and never work as a police officer again, the city will accept your resignation, and drop all current criminal charges against you.”

  He slid a piece of paper across the table for me. There were little sticky notes helpfully placed near where I was to sign.

  “So you want me to quit, get no severance pay, never work as a cop again, and not sue you?” I asked.

  Lubbock nodded. He seemed relieved that I understood.

  “Would you like a blow job too?”

  Lubbock reddened. Winter’s mouth compressed to a fine line. Yost leaned forward.

  “What my client means is this,” he said. “We are prepared to pursue wrongful prosecution, civil rights and excessive force issues with the city. Additionally, your threats of criminal proceedings are fantasies. The victim of the alleged assault has identified another suspect. You’re going to have to do better than that.”

  It went back and forth from there. In the end, I walked out with more than I would have expected: almost a year’s pay, no prosecution, and I didn’t have to surrender my certifications.

  I signed the forms. I stood up, put my copy in my suit pocket and headed for the door. Lubbock opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but I just kept going. I avoided the temptation to make some kind of parting shot, and anything he had to say wasn’t important to me anymore.

  So I just left. The door to the conference room swung shut behind me and I realized the precinct didn’t feel like home to me anymore. It was just another building.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  I shook Yost’s hand in the elevator.

  “Thanks.” I meant it too. I had always figured if you got fired you were just out on your ear. I was actually walking away with something. Al had hooked me up again.

  I picked up the phone, dialed Alex. She picked up on the first ring.

  “Miss me?” I asked.

  “Yes. Meet you out front?”

  “Sure.”

  The sun was out when we stepped out. Al and Alex were waiting for me. Yost made his farewells, claiming he had to be at the courthouse. Alex put her hand around my waist and we walked down the sidewalk towards where Eddie waited by the curb with the van. Al was in the lead.

  “So now what?” Alex asked.

  “Rest,” I said. “I’m tired.”

  She never got to reply. I stumbled then, my burned feet finally declaring that they had had enough. I almost pulled her over with me, steadied myself just in time.

  Something whispered past my ear. Then the back of Al’s head exploded.

  I heard the sharp crack of the supersonic bullet passing us, but the sound of the rifle shot was oddly muffled and flat. We hit the ground and I covered Alex’s body with my own. A second round hit the sidewalk beside us, throwing chips of concrete into my cheek and left eye. There was no cover anywhere. I just did my best to cover Alex up, hoped that whoever was doing the shooting would be satisfied with plugging me, and that the round wouldn’t go through my body.

  But the third shot never came. I realized Alex was screaming, trying to squirm out from under me to get to her dad.

  I could barely see, but I could tell Al was dead. I’d seen it before: high velocity rifle to the head. I pulled Alex back and even more hell broke loose.

  Big Eddie came running up, Glock in hand, and damn near got shot by the posse of cops that came boiling out of the front of Central Precinct. They had him cuffed and on the ground before I could protest that he wasn’t the shooter. I hustled Alex inside, almost dragging her. I wanted her inside, under cover in case the sniper wasn’t really gone.

  Over the next few hours all the usual stuff happened. We told our stories a half a dozen times. I finally got it straightened out that Eddie hadn’t shot anybody. They held him in a cell until somebody verified his Department of Justice credentials. I had my eye cleaned out by the EMTs.

  Alex had skinned her knees and hands when I pushed her down. The EMTs cleaned her up and left. She was still shaking.

  Al had been a legend in the Bureau. So now the command staff found itself in a real pickle. He had been assassinated in front of Police Headquarters in the company of his beloved daughter and a freshly fired rogue cop. They were doing their best to extend her every courtesy and pretend like I didn’t exist.

  Finally Alex had enough. She looked at the sea of Captains, Commanders, and Deputy Chiefs hovering around her and said, “Would you people just leave me the hell alone?” It worked. They were out in a heartbeat. One of the Deputy Chiefs shot me an evil look. I all but dared him to try to tell me to leave the room. I wanted very much to hit someone.

  I walked over, held her. She leaned against me and didn’t say anything for awhile.

  “You going to be ok?” It was a stupid thing for me to ask.

  “Just take me home,” was all she said.

  I found Eddie talking on the phone with one hand and trying to put his shoelaces back in his shoes with the other. He snapped the phone shut when we walked in.

  “A guy will be here with a car for you two in a couple of minutes. There’s some equipment you’ll want in the trunk.” Eddie’s eyes looked different. There was no happy go lucky demeanor left in him. I felt myself go cold as I looked at him. I wondered if that look was the last thing some people saw.

  “I need some people on Alex’s house,” I said. It would have felt good to be all macho and decide I would protect her myself, but I could barely walk and I was exhausted. A troop of girl scouts could have probably walked up on me just then and garroted me with their neckerchiefs.

  He nodded. “They’ll be there before you.”

  “Good people,” I said, thinking of Mickey.

  “I’d trust them with my sister. I’ll be there myself later. But I have some stuff I gotta do.”

  “Ok.”

  We went out the back way. The second we stepped out the door, a Suburban pulled up and two hard asses got out. One of them handed me the keys before walking back to the identical Suburban idling behind it and getting in the back seat.

  Alex got in. I ignored the honking traffic and looked in the back. I pulled a gym bag out and brought its comforting weight with me to the front seat.

  Alex was silent all the way to her house. I didn’t know what to say so I just kept my mouth shut. I counted four cars full of Eddie’s hard asses on her street. They weren’t even trying to be covert. Good.

  I parked in front, started to turn the engine off.

  “I really just would like to be alone right now, Dent,” she said, staring straight ahead.

  I put my hand on hers. “Ok. Give me a call when you want me to come over.”

  She pulled her hand away. “Dent, for right now, just stay away.”

  With that, she got out, strode to her front door, and vanished inside the house.

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I went home. I drove slow, dreading walking into my empty house. The sky was the color of lead.

  I rolled up to my house, parked behind my pickup. I pulled a Glock out of the bag, checked the chamber before I stuffed it in my waistband. I had plenty of guns in the house, but right now I wanted one for the fifty foot walk to my front door.

  The street was deserted and quiet. The loudest thing was my shuffling feet on the concrete as I walked up my sidewalk to the front door.

  I put my key in the lock, pushed open the door, and my house exploded.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  It’s funny what can save your life sometimes.

  Even as I was opening the door, I smelled gasoline. The smell hit me just as I was registering that it was harder to open the front door than it should have been.r />
  I jerked back from the opening.

  They did a sloppy job. They had it rigged to blow before the door opened all the way, so the door protected me from the jet of hot burning gas. I lost my eyebrows and the hair on my arm, but little else. If I’d taken a direct hit, it would have been different.

  The front windows blew out, covering me with broken glass as I rolled across the front lawn. I came to my feet and checked myself. There were some superficial cuts, and the stitches on my arm were oozing blood, but there was nothing too bad. I couldn’t believe it, so I checked myself again.

  All I could see through the front windows was flames. I stood there for a few seconds watching my house burn, cataloging all the things inside.

  I guessed putting off buying furniture was going to turn out to be a smart move after all. Then one thing popped to mind, and I started running to the back yard.

  I knew it was stupid, but I wasn’t going to let the bastards win completely. I made it to the back of the house and saw that the basement wasn’t burning. The grade sloped back here, so the back door was on the basement level. I took one of my lawn chairs, busted out the window closest to the door.

  I knocked out all the shards of glass with the Glock and stuck my head inside. The window wasn’t big enough for me to crawl into, but it was big enough for me to stick my head inside and see that the basement wasn’t rigged to blow the way the upstairs had been. I wasn’t going through that again.

  The basement door handle spun all the way around and the door opened without me using a key. That solved the mystery of how they’d gotten in. They’d punched out the lock. There were muddy footprints leading to the stairs. Bastards.

  The air down here was clear still, but the smell of smoke was heavy. The fire above me was roaring like a beast and I could feel the air rushing in from the door I’d just opened to feed the flames above. I’d read once that fires double in size every thirty seconds.

  I bypassed the gun safes and walked over to my guitar closet. My hands weren’t even shaking as I undid the padlock on the door. My Strat was in its case, just inside the door. I picked it up and felt some small measure of victory. I dithered for a minute, trying to decide if I should grab another guitar or two, or maybe try to get in one of the gun safes.

  There was an ominous cracking sound from above.

  Quit while you’re ahead.

  I ran out of the house, and around to the front door. I never looked back as I put the guitar in my pickup, behind the seat. I pulled the duffel bag full of guns out of the Suburban. I figured it might come in handy.

  I was proud that my pickup fired right up, the first time. I loved that old beast. Taking the Suburban had never even crossed my mind. As I pulled away from the curb my neighbors were coming out on their porches, staring at me as I drove past. I could hear the sirens in the background.

  I left the city limits of Portland the same way I entered it the first time, all those years ago, on Interstate 5, with an old pickup and an even older guitar and very little else. I could see the plume of smoke from my burning house for quite a while, but finally, I lost it in the hills.

  It was raining, so I settled into the right lane and went the speed limit. I flipped on the radio and spun the dial. Jimi Hendrix. All Along the Watchtower. An omen if I’d ever heard one.

  I had a tank full of gas and a decent classic rock station, so I just drove. It had been way too long since I’d gone on a road trip, just driving for the sake of driving.

  Every time it occurred to me that I had some deciding to do, I’d just decide to drive some more. Almost three hours later, I reached the point where I had to decide. The Junction City exit was a mile ahead. My feet were killing me, my arm hurt, I had to pee, and I had a quarter tank of gas, but that wasn’t what was going to drive the decision.

  The exit came up, and I drove on, perfectly balanced between taking it and not taking it for most of the exit lane. Finally, I swerved over, took the exit.

  I got gas, took a leak, and bought a cup of bad coffee at a gas station just off the exit. The old geezer behind the counter looked askance at my torn and muddy suit but didn’t hesitate to give me directions to the cemetery. Maybe he thought I was late for a funeral.

  The cemetery was a pretty place, even with most of the trees bare. I had to hunt around for a while but eventually, I found her.

  I knew I was getting close when a white sedan passed me on one of the cemetery roads. The woman behind the wheel paid me no mind. If she thought of it at all, she probably thought the truck belonged to one of the maintenance crews. But I damn near ran off the road. Heather had looked just like a younger version of the woman behind the wheel.

  I pulled into the spot where the car had just left, got out and looked. There it was in the distance, a fresh grave, the ground still disturbed.

  My feet hurt and I had to stop and rest twice before I got to Heather’s grave, but that gave me a chance to find a good stone. It was round and smooth, white and shot through with blue veins. The sort of thing a girl younger than Heather might have gathered and kept in a drawer somewhere.

  I stood over her grave and remembered.

  I remembered finding her, remembered carrying her up the hill, how small she’d seemed.

  I remembered pulling the trigger on Marshall, and no matter how hard I looked I couldn’t find a shred of remorse inside myself.

  But then I remembered Todd, and his crowd, all the people at Cascade Aviation, Marshall’s father. Maybe I hadn’t closed the case at all. Maybe there was still some work left.

  Then I thought about Al.

  I wondered who would put stones on his grave.

  Al was dead, and in some ways, Alex was too. The old Alex died the second the sniper pulled the trigger and killed her dad right in front of her. The new Alex would always be a person who had seen her dad shot down and turned into a piece of meat on the pavement. I wondered who that person would be.

  I gave Heather’s grave one last look, put the rock on her headstone. Maybe I’d be back with more.

  I limped back to the truck, soaked to the bone. Right now all I owned was a pickup truck, a vintage guitar, and a bag full of guns and I liked it. I felt free for the first time in a long time.

  I drove back through town, towards the interstate. Again I was just driving to be driving, seeing where my nose took me. I drifted towards the interstate, where I’d have to decide. North or South. Back towards Portland, or somewhere else.

  I flipped on the radio, found a folk and bluegrass show. Bob Dylan’s version of “Fixin To Die” rattled out of the old speakers in the truck. Originally by Bukka White, it had come to Bob via Ralph Stanley. It seemed as good a song as any right now.

  Right or left. North or South. Portland or somewhere else.

  I thought about Heather, with only one stone on her grave. I thought about Al, bleeding in front of the Police station where he’d spent so many years helping people.

  I thought about Alex, screaming underneath me, just wanting to get to her father. I thought about Todd, huddling behind the scope of a sniper rifle.

  I took the northbound lane. Back towards Portland.

  Keep reading for an excerpt from Rose City Renegade, Dent Miller Thriller #2, available now!

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  Rose City Renegade Chapter 1

  I was trying to figure out what it would take to get two gangsters to pick a fight with me.

  They were parked on the street. The black BMW stuck out in this neighborhood full of minivans and pickup trucks. I did
n’t think they were trying to be subtle. Two guys sitting in a car for hours, blatantly watching a house, was a great way to attract attention, regardless of the type of car.

  We were in a lower middle-class neighborhood in suburban Vancouver, Washington, right across the river from Portland, Oregon. The house was an older two-story, set well back from the street. It looked like all the other houses on the block until you noticed the security cameras on the porch, and even that wasn’t too unusual these days. The place was a safe house for New Hope International, a group that provided shelter for people who had been victims of human trafficking. Most of them were girls and young women, but there were plenty of boys too. The group had been started by a woman named Linda. In her twenties and thirties, Linda had made millions at a software company, then in her forties put her fortune to work helping victims of human trafficking.

  Six months ago, I’d rescued some young women from a trafficking ring. In the process, I’d lost my job as a police detective, and damn near my life. They’d needed a place to stay, and that’s when I found Linda. She took the survivors, and I helped her out whenever I could. Linda had a very short list of people who dealt with the survivors directly, and they were all women. I helped out with light carpentry and maintenance at the various safe houses. She kept my company, Dent Miller Security And Investigations, on retainer. I hated to bill her, she did such good work. When she spotted the BMW she called me right away.

  I parked a couple of blocks away and walked past them on foot. They were both big guys, blond with short hair and dark clothes. Their clothes and their bone structures made me think they were from Eastern Europe.

  As I walked past, I looked them both in the eye, hard. The guy behind the wheel was younger, maybe his early twenties. He visibly bristled, unconsciously puffing himself up a little. The guy on the passenger side just looked at me placidly, with heavy-lidded eyes that put me in mind of a snake.